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Monday, April 25, 2016

This doesn’t necessarily suggest that none of the mindfulness treatments
work, says study co-author Brett Thombs, a psychologist at McGill and
at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. “I have no doubt that
mindfulness helps a lot of people,” he says. “I’m not against
mindfulness. I think that we need to have honestly and completely
reported evidence to figure out for whom it works and how much.”

The bias towards reporting positive results is pervasive across many types of mental health, psychology and medical research,
says Ferguson. For example, the widely popularized theory of ego
depletion — that people have limited self-control for decisions —
recently failed to hold up
in a large replication trial. “A lot of these things are reported to be
true, they’re in a TEDx talk,” he says. “Now we're seeing, when we look
at things much more closely, we’ve kind of been bullshitting people
[for] a decade.”